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Thursday, March 15, 2012

Commitment Issues and Raiding

Warning : Wall of text incoming.

Back when I was playing WoW passionately, I looooved to raid.

For all the WotLK era, Kizu and I were raiding together pretty casually. In Cataclysm, we got into - I'm not sure exactly how or why - a progression oriented guild. Not in a six-nights-a-week-five-hours-a-day kinda way, but progression was important to us. We wanted to be in the top guilds of the server. For many reasons, we didn't last long. in Firelands, we got 6/7 heroic pretty quickly. And then we hit the wall that is Heroic Ragnaros.

Frankly, raiding was making me sick to my stomach at that point. I didn't even want to log on to raid by the time we got to Rag on heroic. I was hating the "push harder, kill faster" attitude, and more that that, I was hating my fellow raiders for putting so much pressure on us to succeed. We just couldn't kill him, and as time went on, we were getting more and more discouraged, and mean to each other, and you can imagine the rest.

I realize now that I was blaming the other's attitude when in reality, I was the one who made raiding frustrating for myself. I was worried that I was holding them back, which made me question myself and my abilities, which made me grumpy, which made raids anything but fun. It took me a while to realize I just didn't want to raid like that any longer. I've raided almost non-stop since Naxx, with a small interruption around the time Ulduar came out, and then, Firelands made me hate raiding. I say it was Firelands, but really, it wasn't the raid at all. It was me. I made myself hate raiding.

Here's a cute little Nerf to break the boring wall of text.

Yes, I have a point that has to do with Swtor. I'm getting there.

So now, in Swtor, I'm leveling a shit-ton of characters. Because it's a lot of fun. I don't even have a designated main. But I see other bloggers talk about raiding, (I know it's not called a raid, but I'm not saying Operating of Ops'ing. Sue me.) and I'm torn.

The raider in me is yelling "Come ooooon! Le's gooooo! Pick a toon already and make this happen, lady!" I want to experience everything in Swtor. I'm having so much fun with leveling, I don't want it to end. I want to level at least one of each Empire classes to 50. I want to run all the dungeons. I want to do dailies, and farm nice gear. I want to see some of the operations, if not all of them. But I'm worried that I'm not ready yet to make a commitment to a "serious" raiding guild. I'm not sure I want to spend a predetermined day - or two or three - each week, killing internet dragons, or droids or whatever, when I'd rather do something else, like level alts, or gather mats, or read a book or watch a movie!

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'd love to raid in Swtor. At some point. Hopefully before it all becomes obsolete. Because it looks like fun. It'd be great to raid maybe once or twice a week. Two to three weeks a month. Just sign up when you feel like raiding, and don't sign up when you don't feel like it. But I don't need - nor want - to see hardmodes or nightmare modes or whatever it is that they call it in Swtor.

What I want, is to kill bosses with people that know what they're doing, but don't take themselves too seriously, and who don't get upset over a couple wipes, or killing new bosses at a slow rate. (I don't know what's the rush to kill all the bosses as fast as possible. You just get bored faster when you run out of new content to chew on.) I want to see the content, I want to have fun while killing bosses, preferably with friendly people that are serious about raiding when it's time to raid.

What I don't want, is to feel like I have to be there every fucking day, wiping for three hours on a boss that just won't die. Because for me, that's just not fun. Wiping is part of it, sure. But I want to have fun, whether the boss dies or not. Not beat myself up for not progressing quickly enough, and not getting the server first, or some other nonsense.

I know most guilds wouldn't want someone like me. It would make dealing with attendance and group composition a nightmare. But it's still what I want today. Maybe someday, I'll get rid of my commitment issues, and I'll find a fun bunch to raid with.

8 comments:

Ah yep I completely sympathize. I was an on and off raider in WoW and I kind of assumed I'd approach SWTOR in a similar fashion, but so far I'm having more trouble with that.

I'm kind of used to the pressure in WoW, I guess. And SWTOR is a new start and right now I'm just playing how I want to play and enjoying the lack of dps meters and mandatory addons and people yelling at each other for wiping.

I can wholeheartedly agree that it would be nice if there was such a thing as the extremely casual, friendly, yet somehow super organized raiding guild. I'm sure in gamer heaven this exists. Along with the content that somehow never feels old or tedious and the bosses who are hard enough to be challenging but not so hard they make you want to beat your head against the keyboard until one of the two breaks.

I'm tired so if none of that made any sense I apologize.

I hope you can sort of figure out what you want to do. And find the right people to do it with when you decide!

No worries! Not bored yet! Fun fact: I'm hard to bore. I can scribble on paper for hours. I just can't play games when sick XD I mean I could but it would be a lot of dying and mis-clicks and passing out in the middle of fights.

Fun fact: Beating one's head against a wall is not fun! I had a few times in WoW where a boss would just not die for the longest time, and I swear it sapped my desire to raid or log in. And I have never done a hard or nightmare mode or whatever those are.

Mimiron: We spent WEEKS on him. Night 1, we'd clear everything up to him, no problem. Night 2, we'd spend 3 hours wiping. I'd know we were going to wipe. I'd dread logging on because we wouldn't even break up the monotony with one easy boss that night. Nope. All Mimiron, all the time. Then, inevitably, someone would schedule a bonus night that week because "come on, guys, we're so close." After we finally killed him, we met Yogg, which was going to be an even steeper learning curve. I did not care to learn Yogg, and at that point nobody else did either. We moved on to TOC (boss in a box).

Lich King: We killed him right before Cata came out, after a lot of wipes. Again, it was one night a week of pure wipery. Possibly more when we started extending lockouts. I seem to have blocked out the memory. If someone were to mention after cata "hey guys, let's have a retro raid for all of us who never killed LK" I was like NO WAY NO HOW, DO NOT WANT.

Firelands: For weeks we made almost no progress because it was tuned to "too difficult". Then suddenly it was tuned to "too easy." That entire EXPANSION burnt me out completely.

Right now, I'm in a good place raid-wise in the guild. I don't feel like I can blow off raids because "I don't feel like going" because we don't have the roster depth for that and we ARE a raiding focused guild. I traded a bit of casual in exchange for a bit of progression there. However, if I actually have other stuff in real life that I have to do, I don't sign up, and that is fine, even if it causes the raid to be cancelled due to lack of warm bodies. We haven't gotten to the point where we're having wipe nights, but I'm sure it will happen... sometime. None of us did hardmodes in WoW, but we might dip a toe in here if we do really well on normal mode.

I'm glad for you that your raiding experience in swtor is satisfying! I hope you guys keep being successful and having fun for a very long time!

Of course, for the kind of raiding I described, you need a guild with lots of people on the roster, so that raids aren't cancelled due to too few people signing up. I would feel terrible to be the cause of a cancelled raid.

The day I decide I want to focus on raiding, I *will* commit myself to it completely. I'm just not ready for that yet. Maybe for now I can pug it! Or find a guild that rotates it's players in raids, or something like that.

I'm working really hard not to feel guilty about taking a night or two off here and there. I'm sure you know how hard it is to be the only, or one of very few, regular healers in a raid group. That's how I played all of wrath and some of cata too. When it gets to the point that you don't get to dps on alt night because there's nobody available to heal but you... Well that's a problem. So my plan for SWTOR is to take a day of when I need it and not feel bad. It's harder than it sounds and I totally understand your decision to hold off on raiding until later. In fact if I hadn't come into the game with the group I did, I probably would be doing the same thing.

Good luck with your bazillion ALTs! I hope you can find that perfect casual but not lazy guild some day!

By the time I quit WoW, Cataclysm had burnt me out terribly. I'd been raiding for 3.5 years, 3-4 nights/week--not hard-core, but competitive on our server. The thought of getting into a raiding commitment in SWTOR literally made my hands start shaking. But I knew that sooner or later, I would probably want to do some raiding.

At the moment, I'm in a good place. My SWTOR guild has a 2-night/week team which is the progression team, but I don't run with them. I run with the 1-night/week team for alts, newbies, and such. If I can't make it, it's no big deal, as we have plenty of healers. I consider myself very firmly placed in the "casual" category, with no plans to put in the extra grinding time required to really be a serious raider. Been there, done that.